In today's fast paced, complex and business oriented society, it has become increasingly important for some people to be accessible to personal communications at all times. For example, a professional such as a doctor or attorney may need to be constantly available for communications from present and prospective colleagues, patients, clients, family or friends. Other persons in service related fields, for example, repair persons, sales persons, delivery persons and construction contractors and workers, also need to be accessible for communications at all times so that they can serve their customers efficiently. Unfortunately, those persons who require instantaneous communications accessibility are rarely present at a single location where they can be reached by callers via normal telephone service. Locating and communicating with these people is further frustrated by the fact that they rarely maintain a fixed schedule or itinerary.
In order to be accessible for communications at all times, these persons typically obtain one of two communications services; and in fact several of these persons obtain both services. First, the person may engage a paging service to receive and report phone calls made to a selected primary phone number maintained by the person at home, office or some other fixed location. Calls made to the primary number are screened by the paging service and the person notified by phone call or pager with regard to the most important or pressing calls. Alternatively, the calls are recorded by the service on a message board for subsequent call in and recovery. Second, the person may choose to have phone lines installed in a number of important locations frequented by the person to enable communications contact. Both service options share one drawback in that they are expensive to maintain on a monthly basis. The paging service is undesirable as there is no personal communication between the caller and the person. The second service option is undesirable as it requires a caller to locate and remember all phone numbers associated with the separate locations frequented by the person (for example, home, office and cellular). An additional drawback to the multiple phone line service option is that callers often must sequentially dial each number for each location, often more than one time, before finally being able to reach the desired person.
The additional drawbacks and difficulties experienced with persons who maintain separate location communications facilities are apparent and are encountered by frustrated callers on an almost everyday basis. For example, in trying to reach your physician in an emergency situation you would first attempt to contact the office requiring the caller to first locate the doctor's office telephone number. After contacting the receptionist at the office or reaching a message centers the caller may be told that the doctor is at another office, at home or at the hospital requiring the patient to locate and dial more telephone numbers. Again, the doctor may not be at any of the designated locations, but may in fact be in a car and reachable only through a cellular communications service that requires the locating and dialing of yet another number. The process of locating all dialing phone numbers can go on ad infinitum until the doctor is finally located and contacted. In the alternative, the caller may eventually realize that the doctor is not at any of the regular locations and is effectively unreachable.
Accordingly, there is a need for a personal telecommunications service that will provide location independent communications service for a subscribing individual that will enable a caller to contact the subscriber for personal communication or message transmission by dialing a single personal communications phone number.